Btw, The Gathering SE is both a quasi Director's Cut as well as JMS preferred version because it restores the act structure. The first version was cut down by the network. at least that's what I recall.
The first DVD (R1, The Gathering SE / In the Beginning Flipper DVD) had Gathering in 4:3.
I'd really need NTSC TV captures...
Yeah, thanks for the link, I had already checked it out earlier, but then again, it was pretty much self-evident from the transfer that the CGI transfer had massive problems.
The thing is, a "pristine" NTSC transfer of the original 4:3 masters, properly deinterlaced and upscaled, would look sooooo much better than any of the DVDs, it's a shame.
And you're right, a 1,66:1 tranfer might be the sweet spot for a conversion.
Hi!
I remember back in the days before the DVDs I had lots and lots of Babylon 5 SVCDs off Usenet. These were partly captured in the TNT version (16/9, non-anamorphic) and partly in the original full screen versions. When the DVDs came out I got rid of these discs and bought the DVDs. What a mistake!
The DVDs, especially Seasons 1 and 2, are full of film-defects and poorly framed and format-converted CGI. Camera movement in CGI scenes results in jerkiness (all throughout Season 1), they seem to have gotten the field order wrong. I’ve been looking for ways to find proper 29,98 fps NTSC captures of these episodes, but to no avail. Now, I was wondering, with all the preservation efforts going on here, maybe there is someone out with unaltered captures, or maybe there are still broadcasts going on certain cable channels in the US or something …
Since I live in PAL-land, and most of the TV stations have adopted the widescreen versions anyway, I can’t even wait for a broadcast.
Any ideas?
Mine won't. Is pretty new though (bought around Christmas), maybe they changed the drives or something. I even extracted the files of the ISO and re-built them with IMGBurn... nada. Won't buy another bunch of BDR50ties though, 12 Euros !
I don't mind playing them via my HTPC, so...
Sorry for being late to the game, but I was able to download and sucessfully repair Eps 1,2,3,4,5 as BD50 this week - just to find out that the PS3 won't play BD-Rs. :O
However, the "proper reissue" of Ep6 is too corrupted, but I was able to download the "older" release as well as the audio fix. So, about the audio fix - is v4 the latest of them? Is it "correct"? Which application could or should I use to mux it into the m2ts of the "old" bluray?
Can't wait for the official BluRays to come out...
Tried the script today. Thanks g-force, good job! Very power hungry on my AM2 based-desktop, gotta try it on my Macbook Pro, see if Core2Duo has a little more power.
The THX edge enhancement halos are still noticeable, ranging from barely to terribly. It seems as if no matter what video source you use, there's always SOME thing really wrong with it. So far I've seen Pre-THX LDs which have very little detail, THX-LDs with DNR-smear and the GOUT... no matter how much effort
If we ever want to see the original Star Wars in HD (and with small TV starting at 32" and our viewing habits getting used to more and more HD we'll NEED it in HD soon enough) we'll need something like a cleaned up and color-corrected telecine of a theatrical print.
Kinda frustrating.
ONE QUESTION THOUGH - If I intend to upscale to let's say 720p with InstantHD in AfterEffects, should I feed it the anti-aliased NEDI-doubled-in-size video or with the anti-aliasing commented out?
Well well well, now that doesn't look bad at all! Looking forward to see these encoded to a nice DVD9! ;)
However, I think the aspect ratio is slightly off, heads look a bit squeezed to me. Judging from the screenshot the output size (without borders!) should be about 720*400, maybe 384, and then AddBorders to 480.
I'd do it myself, but I'm booked up for work for weeks, but anyway, just to throw in the idea - As for motion smear, there are a lot of unchanged shots that could be taken directly of the 2004 SE DVDs. How about writing a script to color-correct and replace most of those shots? Anybody who has the GOUT on Disc 2 has the SE on Disc 1 as well. That could easily be a team effort directly here on the board.
adywan said:All 4 are now available in alt.binaries.starwars
Thank you! Sincerly! What a great great post!
Trooperman said:The discs are great. Take these 4 discs, throw in the "1975 Casting Auditions" DVD, and then get Jambe Davar's "Making Of" trilogy, and it's the ultimate 8-disc Star Wars special feature set.
That's a good point. Now, do you know a place where I could find any of these extra discs? I can't even find the EditDroid Extras... :(
The great thing for me about this set is that I actually may own these legally, since I own a copy of the Ultimate Edition Lasers, however, I don't have a working player anymore. ;)
Now, just in the interest of community as well the people who already donated money to this project (that to me appears to be dead, I'm sorry to say) -- why not post a h264 encode of the raw captures at a lossless quantisation level to for instance Usenet? That would make one film end up at about 15gigs at SD resolution, making it manageable for a usenet post and many NEW projects could spawn off the work that way already done, breathing new life into this thing?
skyjedi2005, if you have access to a usenet-server, could you maybe up them to a.b.sw? My guess is you'd help out a lot of people. Thanks!
Mielr said:Originally posted by: zombie84
Owning a 35mm print is legal.
I actually think that owning a 35mm print is illegal. Unless the laws have been changed here in the US, I think consumers are only allowed to own 8mm and 16mm prints. I remember hearing a story about how the actor Roddy McDowell had his home raided, and his collection of 35mm films confiscated. Aside from trailers, I think they're banned from eBay, as well.EDIT: I've since learned that owning a 35mm print is not automatically illegal. It depends upon the circumstances.
Exactly, for instance, Quentin Tarantino is known to have a very large private 35mil print collection, and he speaks publically about it, so ownership is not exactly illegal.
I'm not sure, but within the EU it seems to be more of a problem for the seller and less of one for the buyer. For instance, if you sell a fake chinese iPhone you're doing something illegal, but if you buy it you're not, however, you may not resell it. Source: the current issue of the german C'T mag (heise.de).
Moth3r said:
Actually, there were complaints about the audio quality of the Lord of the Rings PAL discs too. I've been told about a Pro Tools plugin called Pitch 'n Time which is supposedly one of the best algorithms. This was not included in the only listening test I'm aware of; this one from 2004.
Well, PitchNTime is (or was) available as an offline plugin for Apple (back then Emagic) Logic as well, at least on the Mac. However, it's dated. Probably the best algo today is the DIRAC algorithm, which can be found in Wavelab 6 or Prosoniq TimeFactory 2. At least that's what the audio world seems to agree on, I have a licence for Wavelab but I rarely have to use time-strechting anywhere.
As for ProTools, as with the current 7.4 we have quite a few things that are outdated, and the time-strechting algos (even though they newly implemented them in 7.4) are part of that. There's a feature that would be great for multi-track drum editing that's called "Elastic Audio", which basically let's you put up markers at drumhits (or any points you'd like for that matter) and move them around freely, changing the tempo and therefor the timing (read - tightness) of the drummer. I know that some very well-known artists and producers use it, but I think it's still a bit immature. The sonic quality is degraded, and though many people won't notice that it VERY MUCH IS noticable for those of us with trained ears. The problem with Pro Tools is that DigiDesign rarely seem to licence any technology from other companies with maybe more knowhow, they always develop something themselves.
Anyway, for sources like a pitch-corrected stream where there's no NTSC source available I'd prefer to use Prosoniq TimeFactory or Wavelab, it'll do a good job under these circumstances.
There has been some discussion here as to how the audio should be handeled. I'm a professional audio engineer, and even though I work in music production I'd like to share my thoughts on the video issue with you guys.
In terms of handeling a speed-up (or speed-down in this case) it seems to be an industry standard in authoring that pitch-shifting is actually never applied as it's degrading sonic quality, even the best algos do, with only a few exceptions like for instance the "Lord of the Rings" PAL discs. Since the source in this case is a laserdisc you can be sure that in 1997 they didn't use time-strechting/pitch-shifting back then, they use either resampling or much more likely some analog conversion.
Now, it works like this: Never time-stretch or compress, only resample. If your source is a PAL disc that has been sped up from an NTSC source the audio is already 4,27% faster and therefor higher in pitch.
25 fps : 48000 Hz = (24000/1001) fps : x Hz --> x = (48000*(24000/1001))/25 ~ 46033,966 Hz
Now, at first you need to merely SET the sample rate of the 48000 Hz audio file to 46033,966 and afterwards convert the samplerate back to 48000 Hz. The loss of sonic quality is limited to some upper highs which arguably only audible to infants and dogs anyway. Pretty straight forward.
EDIT: Alright, I just noticed that this project is 3 years old. Anyway, this is how it should have been handled. ;)
Thanks for your input!
a) I'm glad you "warned" me about the Intensity card, however, I still have a hard time thinking about the necessity of a comb filter. Doesn't it sorta destroy the field order (in other words - deinterlace) and therefor make the process of IVTC somewhat harder?
b) I'm sure I'll try to get a V8000, it seems to be a great choice. THANKS!
c) I'm a little familiar with the process of denoising. However, if you just average out 3 different captures, don't you just end up with a the "average" noise of them? How would this go about efficiently?
Oh, you're right! I'm sorry, could a moderator please move this thread over there? Thanks.
Hey there!
Inspired by a lot of the restoration attempts for the OT here I've recently aquired a copy of the NTSC CAV Definitve Collection Box and now I'm looking for a suited player for playing them back and a capture card to digitize them. I'm doing this just for the fun of it and I don't wanna spend huge amounts of money on this little project, but I guess there might be others out there who want to the same, so I thought I'd start a brainstorming thread to collect the knowledge about it.
1) What Player to use. Sure, there are the X-Players (X0, X9), but they are almost out of anybody's reach price- and availability-wise. And since the picture undergoes digital processing afterwards anyway, is there any use to use a player that comes with all sorts of filters or would it be better to use one that outputs the composite signal without any processing? Pure or pimped, what do you think? I think the LD9 or the V8000 would do a good job, am I wrong? I might be wrong, but with the tools available today (AfterEffects plugins, AviSynth, etc) a high quality 3D-comb-filter seems rather redundant to me. And using the RGB output is supposedly not the purest way of capturing the video since it's stored on the LD in composite format and then transformed Chroma/Luma separated inside the player to conform it to RGB, am I right?
2) What capture cards are suited for the job? I'm thinking about getting a Blackmagic Design Intensity card for the job, it supposedly works very well with Final Cut Studio 2 and has great quality A/D converters.
3) What codec/resolution to capture in? I'm thinking about capturing in NTSC resolution at 480i/29,97fps, the pulldown will then be removed after capture, obviously. I'd like to use ProRes422 on my MAC, with post-processing done scene-wise uncompressed 4:4:4 on both Windows and MacOSX.
4) Up-converting to HD. Sure, there isn't too much resolution on the LDs to begin with, however, I'd like to have a BluRay25 with some offline-rendered upconversion instead of a DVD that's being upconverted to my display-size in real-time. There must be some benefit of doing it that way. What kinda up-scaling algorithms would you prefer? I recently discovered a Shareware program called VideoEnhancer which does a pretty good job, at least I thought so, until I compared the output with of Lanzcos4Resize and it made no difference whatsoever? Any thoughts on that?
5) Multi-pass. I heard Max_Rebo saying on the V8 thread that there's a way to use multi-pass capture to decrease analog noise. How's that done? And can the same be done to increase the detail-level of the capture?
6) Things not yet considered. Any input?
Shoot (first) guys, I'm really interested in how YOU would do it!
Just out of curiosity, but where can one find any of these encodes? Thanks for the PMs. ;)
May I second Dunedain's request for a repost of Ep1-3 of these encodes? A lot of people seemed to have missed out on them, and even though I have a Giganews account, the only thing I could find 170 days back is a post of "Addicted To Star Wars v2", which is a nice gimmick (cool idea WookieGroomer) to have but unfortunatly not really suited for a serious evening at the (home) movies, if you know what I mean.
Thanks in advance.
As far as the upscaling to anamorphic is concerned you should definatly check out a small tool called "Video Enhancer" (www.thedeemon.com), it's the only resizing/upscaling method I know of that is temporal-based and gets detail and sharpness off the neighbouring frames. I've tried various upscaling algorithms (Lanczos, SSpline, RedGiant's InstantHD), and they all do pretty well but the "SuperResolution" does more than noticibly better. 30$ well spent for me. There's a version for AfterEffects available too, but it costs a 100.